On behalf of the Center for Computational Science and the Office of 
Information Technology, we are very pleased to announce that the 
University is expanding its high-end computing facility by the addition of 
an IBM p690 (Regatta) supercomputer. This new system greatly enhances 
our computing capabilities, adding 96 processors, 96 GB of memory and 
nearly 500 Gflops.

While the machine is not yet quite ready to go into production, we have 
made it available for testing by a small number of researchers as early 
"friendly users". At this time, we would like to expand that number, by 
perhaps a dozen, for the remainder of the testing period, which we 
anticipate lasting another 4-6 weeks.

If you are interested in gaining early access to the Regatta as a "friendly 
user" (http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/fug.html), or simply want an early 
introduction to the new system, please plan on attending our introductory 
workshop to be held on June 6. More details regarding this workshop will 
be forthcoming.

As the new IBM systems move into production, we will continue to retire 
our older SGI systems. The next phase of this transition will be the 
decommissioning of Tinker, the last of our SGI Power Challenge systems, 
on July 1, 2002.  This will necessitate some changes in the batch system, 
the details of which will be forthcoming in a separate mailing.  Please note 
that when Tinker is taken offline any data which is left on its /scratch disk 
will be permanently lost. 

Since we will continue to phase-out the SGI systems, including the Origin 
2000s, over the next year or so, we strongly encourage you to move your 
codes onto the IBM SP and Regatta systems as early as possible. If you 
have questions about, or would like help with, porting your code to the 
new systems, you may contact our scientific programming consultants, 
Kadin Tseng (kadin@bu.edu) or Doug Sondak (sondak@bu.edu).  We 
have also established a repository of information on the IBM SP machines 
and will be expanding this with information about the Regatta systems 
shortly. This repository may be found at http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/IBMSP/. 
As a point of comparison, the SGI Origins are powered by 195 MHz 
processors with a peak speed of 390 Mflops versus the Regatta which has 
1.3 GHz processors and a peak speed of 5.2 Gflops.

In addition to the Regatta system, we are also in the process of deploying a 
128-processor Linux cluster, consisting of 52 IBM p330, dual-processor 
compute nodes and 24 IBM Intellistation graphics nodes. The Intellistation 
are being used to drive the Deep Vision Display Wall, a high-resolution, 
tiled, stereoscopic, rear-projection display, located in SCV's Computer 
Graphics Lab. (The display wall has been recently received quite a bit of 
media attention, e.g. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-922122.html, 
http://www.msnbc.com/news/749988.asp). The Linux cluster, which was 
acquired through an IBM Shared University Research grant to support 
work in bioinformatics, quantum chromodynamics and scientific 
visualization, will also be opened up for friendly user testing in the 
coming months.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments, please feel free to 
contact either of us by phone or at the Email addresses below

Sincerely,

Claudio Rebbi, Director CCS (rebbi@bu.edu)
Glenn Bresnahan, Director SCV (glenn@bu.edu)